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Saturday, May 23, 2015

Review: Baited, Full Series (Baited #1-3) by Ali Parker

Rebecca Martin has
achieved most things one might hope to by thirty. She is a successful
business owner, drives a nice car and is wrapping up the details on a
custom built home on the lake. The only thing she is missing is someone
to share her accomplishments with.

One man has never been far
from her thoughts – Kade McMillian, but his return to town after far too
many years of chasing his dreams couldn’t be more poorly timed.

With
a younger man demanding Rebecca attention at the office, she has to
decide between reconstructing a relationship from her past or diving in
deep to something new and seemingly forbidden.

Usually I summarize the book before I get into my review but I'm not going to do that today. I just want to get to all of the deets and then get out. This is the second series that I've read by Ali Parker and probably my last. I've found that these books are just not written for me and are better suited to someone else. What kind of someone else? I have no clue, to be honest. Once again, this author has managed to irritate me with typos and (what I think is) a strange way of writing but I'll get into that in a little while.

From the very beginning of this series I was largely confused. I just read the series Jaded by Ali Parker and there was a character named Kade. Now this character didn't have a big part, it was super small but much to my surprise, there was a pretty big character in this one named Kade as well. In no way was it stated or hinted at the fact that these were the same person. No matching details were given about either character and I'm just not understanding why an author would use a name twice unless it was the same person but if it IS the same person, why wouldn't any of the personal details match up? It was very confusing and I found that this was quite distracting when you're trying to get into a book but instead you're analyzing every sentence trying to see if there is some connection that you're missing.

I have one more tiny nitpick before I move on. I lived most of my life in Oklahoma City ... that's my hometown and it's not Southern Southern but it's Southern ... does that make sense? Well, almost 8 years ago, my husband and I moved our kiddos down to Houston. Now, Houston is Southern. A common word in our vernacular is the infamous Y'ALL. I've said this word (much to the horror of my mom (a teacher)) for pretty much my entire life but it is almost a religion down here in Houston. Anyhow ... y'all is a contraction of two words: you and all. I'm not going to get into the rules for contractions but the apostrophe (in most cases) goes where the letters are removed. It is y'all. Does it look weird, yes. Does it really matter that the author got it wrong? No ... but it was the typo that broke the camel's back.

On to the meat of the story ... basically, the story felt disjointed. This book had a pretty interesting blurb and I had such high hopes but unfortunately, it didn't deliver on hardly any level. The story felt shallow, if that makes sense. There wasn't any grit to it, I didn't feel like I knew the characters or their wants/needs/motivations, and it was a little boring. I expected some steamy romance but what I got instead was a tepid romance that took a backseat to the Parker sub-plot. And no, I don't mean the author ... there is a character named Parker. I won't get into the name thing again but it feels a tad familiar ... Anyway. This Parker sub-plot was an attention hog. I was completely confused as to why this character was taking up so much page space when I would have loved to have learned a little more about our main character and what the heck was going on with her.

I'm going to just leave it at that. I won't be picking up another Ali Parker novel. Fool me once, shame on you ... fool me twice and I'm a damn idiot. Well, this idiot is on to another novel, y'all.